This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that Earth's continents had once been joined in a single landmass and had since drifted apart, a claim he backed with real evidence: the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together like torn paper, matching fossils of the same land-dwelling plants and animals, Glossopteris and Lystrosaurus among them, turned up on continents now separated by oceans they could not have swum, and matching rock strata and mountain ranges lined up across the Atlantic as if sliced through. Wegener called it continental drift, and he spent the rest of his career defending it against a scientific establishment that mostly rejected it outright.
The rejection was not unreasonable on its own terms. Wegener could describe what had happened but not how: he proposed that the continents ploughed through the ocean floor like icebreakers, driven by tidal forces and Earth's rotation, and physicists calculated that no such force came anywhere close to strong enough to move a continent. Without a credible mechanism, most geologists treated continental drift as an intriguing coincidence of shapes rather than a real process, and Wegener died in 1930, on a Greenland expedition unrelated to the theory, without seeing it accepted.
The missing mechanism arrived piecemeal between 1959 and 1963, once oceanographers had the tools to study the sea floor itself. Harry Hess proposed seafloor spreading, new ocean crust forming continuously at mid-ocean ridges and pushing older crust outward, and magnetic surveys of the seafloor found a strange, symmetric pattern of stripes on either side of those ridges, alternating in polarity, that matched Earth's own record of magnetic field reversals like a barcode. That pattern could only mean the seafloor itself was spreading outward from the ridge over time, carrying the continents with it. By 1965 to 1967, geologists had assembled seafloor spreading, the newly mapped ridges and trenches, and the distribution of earthquakes worldwide into plate tectonics, a single framework describing Earth's rigid outer shell as a set of moving plates whose interactions build mountains, open oceans and trigger earthquakes at their boundaries.
Plate tectonics did not merely replace continental drift, it explained it: Wegener's matching coastlines, fossils and rock strata were real evidence of a real process, he had simply lacked the physics to say what was driving it. His vindication, delivered three and a half decades after his death, is one of the clearest cases in the history of science of an idea being correct in its substance long before it was correct in its mechanism.